May 16 Creating High Self Esteem in Your Children

Today, many people are suffering from the effects of low self-esteem and low self-worth. The emotional endemic manifests itself in a variety of ways; none of which are particularly productive or pleasant for the individual or society at large.

Many times, people will blame their childhood and upbringing for their lack of self-esteem and if you notice, a lot of therapeutic work is focused on resolving issues from childhood.

With this in mind, a lot of parents are much more aware today with regard to the impact childhood experiences will have on their child’s emotional development and wellbeing. Whilst we’re fortunate to live in a time where parents are becoming much more emotionally aware there’s still room for improvement when it comes to teaching our kids to love and approve of themselves.

The reality is that creating high self-esteem is a recipe, much like baking a cake, in that you need the right ingredients in the correct order to get the cake to rise.

See, even intelligent children that do well academically, or within sports, and experience the differentiation for gifted students by going to a prestigious school or academy can offer with low self-esteem, particularly if they feel they have to perform well in order to ‘earn’ love from their parents rather than it being reliably there, no matter what.

If you take heed of the the pointers below, they will help ensure your children will not suffer, in later life, from the achilles heel that is low self-esteem.

SELF LOVE

In many ways you could view self-esteem to be akin to self-love, however, self-esteem tends to be more about how competent we feel in terms of delivering a tangible output, achieving a particular goal, or how much we value the impact and contribution we make.

Self love, on the other hand, is much more about self-acceptance and loving ourselves just the way we are. Of course, this lesson isn’t limited to children, often the parents need to learn it first… as how can you teach your children to love, respect and value themselves if you don’t as a parent.

Self love isn’t about feeling good enough due to external achievements - it’s about accepting the less successful and desirable aspects and loving themselves anyway.

It’s about breaking free from the rules that society makes up, such as the idea that you have to be thin to be considered beautiful - and accepting yourself for how you are, viewing yourself as beautiful on the inside and outside; irrespective of external factors.

Louise Hay, one of the world’s leading experts in this area of self-love states: “Self love is a deep appreciation. When I talk about loving ourselves, I mean having a deep appreciation for who we are. We accept all the different parts of ourselves—our little peculiarities, the embarrassments, the things we may not do so well, and all the wonderful qualities, too.”

Louise goes on to explain that many of us make self love such as “we will love ourselves WHEN we lose weight, get a higher score in a test, and so on. We put external conditions on our internal sense of self-worth often meaning it’s always kept out of reach.